You are reading far too much into it and your soapbox seems very high for a completely new ReasonTalker. I'm guessing you have another ReasonTalk account.reasonosaer wrote: ↑20 Dec 2022actually, unless reason is built in some really weird way i can't imagine it was a lot more work for them to partially implement vst and now vst3 support while completely disabling all midi routing functionality (which is part of the vst3 spec) and hiding it from the end user without breaking anything else (if they haven't, we'll see..). i suspect this is done because they want player REs to be the only composition aid type plugins available in the rack. by doing so they make reason and the rack plugin a walled garden for midi based music theory plugins that just so happen to be the fastest growing segment of the plugin market by far - ask someone from PB about sales numbers for scalar vs everything else they sell if you don't believe me. they apparently want this bad enough to do some more extra work making sure people can't use the rack plugin as a work around to get midi output from vsts in reason standalone.DaveyG wrote: ↑20 Dec 2022
I don't think Reason has any MIDI routing as such. I think it uses its own internal system which may not be very compatible with what we think of as MIDI. In a perfect world the back panel of every rack device would have MIDI ports as well as CV and we'd be free to interconnect/split/merge that stuff in any way we can think of but I think that is not as easy for RS to implement.as we might assume. As a result you get people using Combinators to route one "MIDI signal" to multiple things, which works but is very much a workaround rather than ideal.
I think this is also the reason that RS are reluctant to add support for VSTs that generate MIDI, such as Scaler 2, Captain Chords etc.
basically they've created the same situation for player REs that they wanted for REs in general, i.e. to be able to sell plugins with zero resale value to a captive audience without having to actually compete in the vst market. i've worked with dozens of younger artists in their 20s who came up finger drumming on MPCs and are essentially one finger composers with zero knowledge of music theory and zero desire to learn any (why should they it hasn't held them back so far?) it's not a stretch to say that the majority of people under 30 i've mixed music for don't read music or play a traditional instrument and lots of them are using scaler / instachord / cthulu / captain plugins, etc. RS think they are being clever by forcing this crowd to buy players if they want access to that kind of composition in the rack, but i've literally never met a single person younger than myself (37) who uses reason, they're all using ableton, bitwig, or fl studio.
I imagine the hedge fund types steering the RS ship these days will again fail to learn the lesson their forebears at Props obviously didn't learn when they tried to do the same thing with REs thinking about all the money they were going to make and wound up being forced to sell their company instead. in that case they only reversed course when it became clear to them (several years after it was obvious to everyone but them including most of their userbase) that failing to support vsts in reason was a miscalculation that was going to be the end of the company unless they backtracked at which point they were already a decade behind the competition. that's how we got to the embarassing situation RS are in today where they have to publicly humiliate themselves by trotting out partial support for a standard everyone else implemented years ago as a major accomplishment. it's just as cringe as being really proud of adding crossfades in 2018 or partially implemented hi-res display support in 2021, etc, etc...
I think if VST MIDI was simple to implement then RS would have already done it. Other theories are available but.... Occam's razor.....